I’d like to allow residential customers to schedule and reschedule their appointments online.
Does anyone know of a proven and reliable way of doing that?
How are you going to let a customer schedule there cleanings. What if they schedule when your booked ?
This is something that has to be done over the phone with your calendar open.
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Housecall Pro lets customers book online and they can only choose slots when there is nothing conflicting on your schedule ie no other appointments or days blocked off by you. And you set the hours and days you’re accepting appointments of course.
I’m not 100% if your client could reschedule but I imagine they could. It’s a handy tool, for now I do them via the phone but it would be nice to automate that side of things eventually
Responsibid is another option, but the price tag is fairly high IMO
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Just curious; is your service area relatively small? Or is there a way to sort out distances between jobs ect?
If a job on the west side schedules right after an East side job and then another East side schedules right after west side, how do you sort that out to maximize your time?
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I have thought about this , but it would only create problem . For example , client has a super big home , and schedules at 3pm . And the next day is booked . Or a small job gets schedule in the middle of the day , and now you can’t fit certain jobs before or after . Or if clients schedule jobs and they are way far apart from each other . This system works great if you’re a barber or something similar, where most jobs take about the same time and they come to you . Hope this helps
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Problem with this is they don’t know where you will be. Part of my scheduling is routing and working efficiently, customers might pick a day that’s gonna make you travel more.
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I am going to phrase this as tactfully as I can:
I personally would not want anyone rescheduling me. And, I do not reschedule my customers.
I can’t imagine why I would want them to have control over my schedule through some software.
Sigh…
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@Majestic66 @JoshT @Endless @GenaroGuzman @Denver13 @DanTheWindowMan
Thanks for the feedback. Could you see this being a competitive advantage for a company dedicated to a smaller service area?
Any other recommended programs out there? Housecall Pro and Responsibid shaping up to be the only 2
I use the customer factor and prefer it to anything even lacking the self scheduling. However for online stuff I did free trials with jobber and housecall and much prefer jobber. There is also a program called workiz that wasn’t bad but not sure if there is online booking. It would certainly be an advantage but does come with problems. One thing I liked about Jobber is they had an online portal where customers could log in at anytime and see there appointment, past appointments, price etc. That is nice cuz if they can do that they can always log into see if there next appt. 3 months away doesnt work they know by the portal.
We’ve been using ResponsiBid for about 3 years. We let customers schedule themselves. They cannot reschedule.
We run 6 trucks and it works well, we have each truck as a separate Google Calendar. ResponsiBid reads the calendar and lets customers schedule according to our paramaters. Things like when the truck starts work (8am) when it ends (4pm). How long maximum drive distance between jobs. Capacity $$$$ a truck can produce.
I imagine for a solo/owner-operator it would be a lot easier and more efficient. You have 1 truck, you can produce $800/day, you set maximum travel distance of 15 miles.
It would help you cut down on non-billable time because you don’t have to call customer and look at your calendar to figure out what is the best appointment time. Everything is done inside of ResponsiBid based on what you set as optimal parameters.
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How does responsibid know how long a job takes without looking at it ? Yes we can give it the window count the size of the house , but unless your working in a cookie cutter environment it just not real world times IMHO. Your also relying on the customer to put in the right size am count an all that. 
Also I don’t want some program dictating my pricing. I don’t know man I really belive there is money left on the table with this app. I know your saving time so I gues that’s the pay off.
I could be wrong , an I probably am , becisse you’ve been using it for 3 years , I’m just curious. I’m sure your running into some problems with scheduling, and pricing.
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We don’t allow customer to input any data. We do estimates in person or Google Street View and Satellite. So ResponsiBid only allows customer to schedule AFTER we have a price for their job. So if we bid the job at $600 we KNOW it’ll take about 8 man hours. Once we have estimate in ResponsiBid we know how long a job will take. (You know that we ALL know “roughly” how long it’ll take). If our billable hour is $150/ 2man crew… then we know a $600 job will take 4 hours. That means if we get there at 9am… we’ll be finished at 1pm… give or take a few minutes.
Anyone who runs multiple crews understands that business is a game of AVERAGES. Some jobs your crew will finish 1 hour faster, or 1 hour slower. Over a 40-week Residential season… it averages out. There are 3-4 per year where the job was REALLY underbid or REALLY overbid… but it averages out.
I hope that makes sense and answers your question. If you are a 1-man show… the numbers make even more sense because you will save countless hours having to speak with customers to schedule them!
We do 99% Window Cleaning on the Residental side and our average Residential is $445.
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Hey dgalkin- how do the logistics work for this?
Is it pretty smooth going from initial contact – > customer being allowed to schedule?
Super smooth. If you put your email here I’d be happy to email you exactly what our customer sees. That way you can see the process.
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Thanks @dgalkin I received your email.
As a follow up question, with the link to schedule are you able to cancel that privilege? (or do I have the right to schedule for as long as I have the proposal email?)
One other question: Can you alter your availability for different customers? Ex. one customer sees availability this weekend only, another sees availability for next weekend only
You cannot cancel the privilege per individual customer. You can disable the feature completely for everyone.
You cannot alter availability for different customers. If you say you are available Mon-Fri 8am - 4pm… then that is your schedule. You can always go in and block off a day or a week in your Google Calendar and then that won’t show as available to ANY customers.
Maybe @Responsibid can connect with you and help answer your questions in more detail.
Hi there!
Sorry I don’t get notifications here, but I’d be happy to walk you though it. Basically @dgalkin does a good job of explaining all the in’s and outs, but essentially it comes down to this: Letting a customer self-schedule is going to become more and more important as the future rolls on… but it’s a very dangerous proposition. That’s why we were so careful to build our intelligent scheduling technology to account for all the things you’re asking about (crew speed, variances, drive-time, the changes happening all the time in the calendar, rescheduling, and competitors potentially taking up spots in your calendar.)
So we can show you how it would all work, because it looks very simple to the customer, it looks a tiny bit more complicated to your internal admin scheduler, and it is about a 30 minute project to setup all the rules of your scheduling.
Now on to the other questions:
Can you alter your availability for different customers? Ex. one customer sees availability this weekend only, another sees availability for next weekend only: No, but you the job type and how big it is, and what hours you are willing to work on the weekend, etc will only show if ResponsiBid sees it as a
“no brainer” from 2 perspectives: does the job fit in the day and still leave 20% capacity? Will it fit into the ideal drive-time conditions you outline in your setup? So the customer will only be offered times if it makes perfect sense. It was designed to think like an office manager.
With the link to schedule are you able to cancel that privilege? It’s important to note that we do allow the option of turning on a Pay-Pal deposit option. It makes it so your customer who is scheduling has to pay a percentage or flat dollar amount before they can actually schedule themselves. That is a way to ensure that fake people aren’t really taking time on your calendar.
Feel free to schedule a demo with us at https://get.responsibid.com (there’s a chat feature you can get a demo with us) and we can show you behind the scenes. The skeptics are our best clients because it was designed by a window cleaner, for window cleaners and with all the reservations that come with something that seems so impossible. 
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